Tasha nodded. Her eyes were wet, but her chin was up.
“Daddy,” she said. “You’re not going to Glen Arden.”
“No,” he said. “Not today.”
He went back out through the curtain. Quentin stepped aside without being asked and handed him his clippers, and Leon finished the young man’s fade, and then he cut Big Ray, and then he cut a quiet man in a city bus driver’s uniform whose name he could never afterward recall, and in all that time no one in Carter’s Chair said a single word to him that was not about hair, and he would always love them for it. Odell Pettiford stayed long past his usual hour, the butterscotch candies coming out of his jacket one at a time, until at seven o’clock Leon turned the sign on the door, and the old man pulled on his coat and put a hand on Leon’s arm on his way out, and squeezed once, and went home.
*
Bethel Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church sat on Druid Hill Avenue in a building of brown stone that had been a Presbyterian church until 1924, when the Presbyterians moved north and Black Baltimore moved in and made the place ring. It had a square bell tower and three tall windows of stained glass along each side and a set of marble steps out front worn into shallow dishes by a century of Sunday shoes. Leon had been married on those steps. He had carried Tasha down them in a white christening gown. He had walked down them four years ago behind a casket covered in white roses, and he had not walked up them since.
Odessa Lyles was waiting at the side door under the little iron lamp, a ring of keys the size of a dinner plate in her hand. She was seventy-two years old and four feet eleven inches tall and had been the church administrator at Bethel Hope for thirty-eight years, through four pastors, two roof replacements, and one memorable flood, and she had been Loretta’s best friend since the two of them were girls jumping double-dutch on Etting Street. She wore a purple coat and a matching purple hat and an expression Leon could not read.